Upgrading to VLC 2.0 on Ubuntu 11.04 with checkinstall

There doesn't seem to be an official Debian package yet (at least I couldn't find a natty ppa), so I installed from source with checkinstall.
Checkinstall (instead of make install) creates a local .deb package, which can be uninstalled via dpkg -s vlc when the official repositories catch up.
The configure script kept popping up with missing packages, so I posted a list here. It's probably not complete (depending on what I had installed already) and might include a few unnecessary dev packages. Anyway, missing packages can usually be resolved by  aptitude search <keyword>.
Checkinstall failed at first being unable to create /usr/local/include/vlc and not finding vlc-cache-gen  (source). Afterwards, vlc crashed at startup missing some libraries, which had ended up in /usr/local/lib instead of /usr/lib, so I had to create a few symbolic links (source).

Eee PC 1015 disassembly

As previously mentioned, I'll not take apart my ASUS U43 unless I absolutely have to. However, one of my friends had an Eee PC with a possibly broken DC jack, so we decided to have a look.

Asus Bamboo disassembly

I don't want to try this until I absolutely have to, but I found a short disassembly guide for my Asus U43jc hidden in an insanely long forum thread (page 188, user tenchi71):

Kmail opens hyperlinks in two browser tabs

I found the solution on the KDE community forums: Go to System Settings->Default Applications->Web Browser (not KMail settings) and remove the '%U' argument.

batch convert svg->pdf with Inkscape

for file in *.svg; do inkscape -z -f=$file -A=${file/.svg/.pdf}; done
In other words, RTFM ;)

Corrupted directory on NTFS partition

...which I hadn't done for 6 weeks (expect snarky comments from daWuzzzz below). Imagine my joy when Kubuntu came up with I/O errors trying to open my research data directory. Of course, it had to be the single most important directory on my computer, everything else on my NTFS partition was fine. And of course it had to happen at 2am. Windows wasn't more helpful and just displayed a 'corrupted directory' message. In retrospect, I suspect a damaged master file table. A quick summary of last night:

enabling Nepomuk/Strigi search eats up home directory space

A few days ago I decided to enable Krunner's desktop search/strigi implementation - strigi indexing was not enabled before.
It might have slowed down Medusa a bit, but the most noticeable feature was my 30GB home partition running constantly out of disk space.
File/directory size analysis with du -h --max-depth=2 | grep '^[5-9][0-9]\{2\}M\|[0-9]G' > listfile.txt and ls -lha | grep 'G' ~  found the culprit: a whopping 13 GB .xsession-errors file. This is a well-known problem, apparently Nepomuk/Soprano is pretty garrulous. 
First aid: delete the file and reboot. For a more permanent workaround, a poster in this discussion suggests linking .xsession-errors to /dev/null via an autostart shell script. As an alternative, I'd suggest adding ln -sf /dev/null /home/<yourusername>/.xsession-errors to your ~/.bashrc.
As an aside: for anyone puzzled by the redland/sesame backend debate, the current backend is virtuoso and supposed to be faster than any of the above.

openSuSE 11.4 on VMware Player Win

Since my Samsung P35 already choked on 11.3 and runs Kubuntu very nicely without hassle, but I still was curious about 11.4, I decided to install it in VMPlayer on my Windows 7 office machine.